Here is the first picture of a non-reference design Radeon HD 7970 graphics card. Made by Gigabyte, the GV-R797OC-3GD is a factory-overclocked graphics card, which makes use of a custom Ultra Durable VGA+ PCB by the company, and a custom-design triple-fan WindForce cooler. Its Ultra Durable VGA+ PCB makes use of 2 oz copper layer for better electrical stability and heat distribution, ferrite-core chokes, low RDS (on) MOSFETs, hand-picked high-performance GDDR5 memory chips, etc.

The cooler makes use of a combination of heatsinks and aluminum fin arrays to which heat from the GPU, memory, and VRM is fed by copper heat-pipes, and ventilated by three fans. Gigabyte also has a reference-design graphics card, which uses a reference-design cooling assembly, and most likely also a reference design PCB, except that it's colored red. It's not likely that red color PCB will be standard among AIB-branded retail cards, because the HIS and MSI cards pictured by OCUK recently, were found to have black-colored ones. There's no word of the pricing or clock speeds.

Damn this means custom pcb/coolers will be available at launch? I read somewhere AMD was allowing it for 7950. I've always wanted a Gigabyte with the Windforce cooler. Black pcb would be nice, but I like the blue. Must scour for PWM details. This or an MSI with a killer PWM array is what me wants..

Uhm... not exactly. Sapphire for example, are making their own PCB to save costs and they sell alot of these PCB-based cards for a reference-card price-tag. So does Gigabyte

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I have to agree with this.
Before I knew about reference card being cheaper rather than better, I went out and bought a non-reference card.
I didn't know the reasons why it was cheaper and from my untrained point of view it seemed like a great deal as it was a shorter PCB and had what appeared to be superior cooling (Zalman VF830).

Well.

It didn't have superior cooling as the fan was locked at 80%, only cooling down the card to 71degC and the chokes were making an awful whine.
Went through three of them.
The last one I accidentally dropped and ended up getting an HD4850 instead.

Also in quite a few cases the non-reference coolers have no VRAM and/or VRM cooling.